Monday, April 14, 2008

New NASA lunar institute opens its doors

Last week, on a bright and unseasonably warm Friday afternoon, NASA dedicated its new Lunar Science Institute on the campus of its Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The institute's interim director, David Morrison, said it will create a scientific foundation for a "great burst of exploration" over the next decade.

The institute is housed in the former residence of the admiral at Moffett Field air base. But in recent years, the building had fallen into neglect and it has had to be extensively remodelled.

Like the admiral's quarters, NASA's lunar programme has been given a new lease of life and sense of purpose. The space agency has sent only two unmanned missions to the moon, Lunar Prospector and Clementine, since 1972. But NASA has committed itself to five unmanned lunar missions over the next six years.

China and Japan already have satellites orbiting the moon, and India will launch one later this year. "The whole world is going to the moon," said Pete Worden, director of the Ames Research Center.

But who will analyse the data produced by all these missions? During the Apollo programme, the US boasted hundreds of lunar scientists. Now, only a few of them remain, and they aren't getting any younger. "The next generation of scientists may be our most important product," said Worden. "Those are the men and women who are going to figure out the really neat things about the moon, about how to operate on the moon, and what you can do from the moon."

Worden and Morrison see the new institute as the nexus for that new community. It will be a "virtual institute" in the sense that its administration will take place in the admiral's quarters but the actual research will take place elsewhere.

NASA plans to select the first four research sites towards the end of this year. Each one will be funded to the tune of $1 to $2 million annually, and together they will employ about 50 scientists. As NASA's lunar budget grows in the build-up to a human flight to the moon by 2020, the institute will grow to include more collaborating sites, including sites in other countries. "I would anticipate that within a few years we may have five or six nodes abroad," said Worden.

On Friday, the mood was decidedly festive, with "moon pies", wine and cheese for a crowd of 200 well-wishers, including Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and US Congressman Mike Honda. The building was still not air-conditioned (which prompted Morrison to call the event a "thermal test" of the new facility, a joking reference to spacecraft tests).

However, it was well furnished with other delights, including an Apollo 16 moon rock, a large rotating moon globe and a mock-up of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, a spacecraft that should launch in three years' time.

"This building looked naked one or two months ago and now it's full of life," Morrison commented. If all goes well, that will soon be true of its lunar science programme.

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